Virginia Dwan, a Jet Age Medici, Gets Her Due

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Virginia Dwan against a Sol LeWitt piece at her apartment in Manhattan. Her work as a gallery owner and artists’ patron will be the subject of an exhibition, “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-1971” in the renovated East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, starting Sept. 30.CreditAlex Wroblewski/The New York Times

Giving a tour of her art-filled apartment off Central Park, the dealer Virginia Dwan is all diffidence and grace. Dressed in elegant gray-on-gray, she speaks softly of her black-on-black abstraction by Ad Reinhardt, most meditative of Abstract Expressionists. She waxes quietly enthusiastic about a grid of copper floor tiles by the Minimalist Carl André. She shows off a series of clear plastic boxes by Charles Ross, a pioneer of Land Art whose work with prisms, she says, never got him the attention he deserves.

Ms. Dwan settles down in a plush armchair; Mitsou the cat climbs aboard; a voice recorder is turned on — and the reticence disappears. Ms. Dwan has issues she wants on the table: what she calls the new “commodities market for art” where great objects “aren’t appreciated individually as works,” and the roster of great female dealers — she doesn’t mention herself — whose contributions have been overshadowed by their male counterparts. “They should all get more attention than they do,” she says.

There’s not much Ms. Dwan can do about the first of her gripes, but she’s making headway on the second. Many of her masterpieces are on their way to the National Gallery in Washington, where an expansive exhibition called “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971” opens on Sept. 30. It inaugurates the museum’s renovated East Building, a 1978 structure by I.M. Pei, whose galleries will be reopening after three years and almost $70 million in work.

“There’s a rightness to having that show in that building,” the exhibition’s organizer, James Meyer, said by phone. He called the structure “the iconic building of the 1970s” — precisely when many Dwan artists were becoming most widely recognized.

Mr. Meyer compared Ms. Dwan to fabled art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, who helped promote Impressionism, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who did the same for Cubism. But even those greats may not have had quite the prophetic skills of Ms. Dwan, or her range. In the space of just a dozen years, she was present at the creation of a series of influential movements, from Minimalism to Conceptualism to Land Art. Those are all now held in depth at the National Gallery, thanks to the 250 works that Ms. Dwan has donated or promised.

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The owner in the Dwan Gallery during the exhibition “Language III” in 1969.CreditRoger Prigent, via Dwan Gallery Archive

Ms. Dwan speaks of being born in Minneapolis in 1931, into a middle-class family. (“I’ve never told my age before, but by now I’ve gotten old enough to think, ‘May as well.’”) She moved to Los Angeles when she was 17 and enrolled in fine art at U.C.L.A. After a decade spent dipping into the art scene, she opened a gallery near the university campus, miles from the city’s most notable dealers, on La Cienega Boulevard.

Irving Blum, one of them, remembers the splash the Dwan Gallery made with exhibitions of Reinhardt’s radical black-on-blacks; of Yves Klein’s blue-on-blues; and of the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg, which married painting and assemblage art. While Mr. Blum was promoting the Los Angeles art scene, Ms. Dwan leapfrogged over his efforts, introducing Angelenos to the most challenging work she could bring back from New York and Paris.

The Washington exhibition dwells on the voyages of Ms. Dwan and the new Jet Age culture she was part of — on “the technologies of travel, and how this was affecting aesthetic practice,” as Mr. Meyer put it. The advent of passenger jets and the new Interstate System let Ms. Dwan, her artists and their work cross the continent, and the Atlantic, as never before.

There was one other aspect to the Jet Age that Mr. Blum can’t help pointing out: The new travel cost money, and Ms. Dwan had lots of that, inherited from a grandfather who had a role in founding the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company — better known as 3M. It made for an unusually strong safety net.

Ms. Dwan was free to show the absolutely unsalable: Her first collectors resisted the appeal even of Rauschenberg’s Combines.

If an artist had ambitions to work on a grand scale, Ms. Dwan could help. Mark di Suvero once shipped in a sculpture that was too big to fit her two-story space, but rather than ask him to scale back, she cut a hole in her ceiling.

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Claes Oldenburg’s “Study for Announcement for One-Man Show at Dwan Gallery — Mickey Mouse with Red Heart,” from 1963.CreditClaes Oldenburg/Whitney Museum of American Art

If an artist’s work wasn’t attracting buyers, she’d offer a stipend to keep food on the table.

Carl André was one of those struggling artists. Reached on the phone at his New York studio, he recalled trying to pay her back once his career took off: “Virginia said, ‘Oh, forget about that.’”

Ms. Dwan’s home in Malibu included a guesthouse where artists could stay for as long as it took to make new work in the gallery: “There was a feeling of connection, other than just paying them — I was interested in their ideas,” Ms. Dwan recalled.

“She liked the company of artists,” said Mr. André, who especially valued the “Friday-night socials” hosted by Ms. Dwan and the range of thoughts they put in play. “Her tastes were small-c catholic.”

Contemporaries say that Ms. Dwan came closer to functioning as an Old World patron than a New World dealer. But in capitalist, democratic America, the “dealer” label may have helped make her more effective. Artists felt better taking a stipend against future sales than accepting aristocratic largess; an offer of yearly shows before a gallery’s public was more appealing than an offer to deck out a patron’s walls.

Ms. Dwan’s greatest moment as a Jet Age Medici came after 1965, when she opened her New York gallery. She backed the new medium of Land Art. When Robert Smithson wanted to work on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, her encouragement and funds led to his landmark “Spiral Jetty.” On a plot in Arizona, she commissioned Walter de Maria’s first version of his great “Lightning Field.” She began to finance Charles Ross’s “Star Axis,” a stellar observatory, of sorts, still in progress today on a mesa in New Mexico.

That list of names — all male — reveals Ms. Dwan’s one notable blind spot as a dealer and art lover: She didn’t recognize the importance of all the female artists, and the feminist works, that now seem crucial to that era. “Virginia Dwan was the head of a very exclusive boys’ club,” the feminist artist Judith Bernstein wrote in a recent email, adding, “Minimal and Land Art was a very exclusionary club, which few women were allowed to enter.”

Agnes Denes, one of several women who did do notable work on the land, was included in a group show at the Dwan but felt there wasn’t much chance of being added to its roster of artists which did include some women — Niki de Saint Phalle was the most famous among them — but was clearly heavy on men. Given the pervasive sexism in New York’s the gallery scene, “You just didn’t try,” she said in a recent phone call.

All these decades later, Ms. Dwan feels more sympathy for such issues than she did then. When a feminist critic once asked her to join a group campaigning for female artists’ rights, “I told her that I had the gallery, that I was doing what I wanted to do, and that I had no reason really to complain. And she said, ‘Well, all the more reason that you should join us,’” Ms. Dwan recalled, adding, “She was probably right.”

Ms. Denes believes there was a larger, artistic gap between the work of Ms. Dwan’s “boys” and what women like her were up to. Male artists worked on the land “as an extension of their studios — they needed more space,” she said, and what they came up with served the traditional goals of achieving transcendence and the sublime, or at least splashy, impressive effects. Whereas their female peers tended to have a new, more political edge to their art — in Ms. Denes’s case, drawing attention to ecological issues that were just hitting the news.

As Ms. Dwan put it, “Negative space, emptiness, monochrome — those are all things that are meaningful to me, and very important in art.” She admits that politics comes further down that list. Reached at his Dwan-funded mesa, Mr. Ross dwelled on the “spiritual interests” that inspired his patron’s concern for space and light and the land. Ms. Dwan herself mentioned time spent at ashrams and Buddhist retreats but insisted that, for her, “art answers that need, that search, better than any other form.”

After shuttering her gallery in 1971 — “I couldn’t continue forever to lose money” — she spent the cash once swallowed by gallery overhead directly on artists’ ventures.

But there’s no doubt that Ms. Dwan’s own skills as a promoter of art that was pure idea, or art so massive it could only live a jet flight away, had already made her outgrow the role of gallery owner. As Mr. Meyer has written, “The most adventuresome of her artists had brought the white cube — the pristine, ‘neutral’ aesthetic container — to the brink of irrelevance.”